Although the TRON foundation has announced “tons of supposed USDT prizes” for switching from developing decentralized applications (dApps) on Ethereum (ETH) to Tron, a reddit user called “9hil” has revealed that most of the developers building apps on Tron “just wanted a piece of the content prizes.” According to the redditor, most of the Ethereum developers he knows “personally” are “still planning to continue developing on Eth.”

Prizes Weren't Handed Out On Time

Moreover, it’s “pretty easy to put an Ethereum dApp onto Tron”, the reddit user claims. Going on to point out that the TRON foundation did not announce winners for its dApp development contest on January 12, 9hil shared the explanation the Tron team game not to hand out prizes on time. In an email reportedly sent to all the “winners”, Tron’s management wrote:

Due to the unexpectedly high volume of competitive projects, we have made some adjustments to the prize structure, one of them is to award over 100+ projects instead of 56 projects. More details to be announced soon. Please stay tuned.

According to the reddit user, Tron’s support team has dropped the lowest prize to $1,000 (from $5,000). Reacting to the announcements, one of Tron’s Super Representative (transaction validator) candidates was quoted as saying:

Nobody even knows that they'll pay out the full 1,000,000. I can guarantee they won't. They didn't pay out the full amount last competition. They're not cutting prize amounts because so many people supposedly entered; they're cutting them because they won't pay the full amount.

Ponzi Scheme Games Winning Prizes?

The redditor also mentioned that there had been “some people” who claimed they “won $1,000 ... , but interestingly” never talked about it publicly. He shared a link to an Instagram post of what he referred to as “some random person associated with ’STOken Studio’.” Claiming to have won a $200,000 prize, details regarding STOken’s dApp are nowhere to be found on the internet, according to the reddit user’s investigation.

There was a link to SToken’s Github page which was “embarrassingly [almost] empty” as it "only had 3 commits.” Soon after publishing his post on Reddit, the user noted that the Github page had either been deleted or made private. As the page is unavailable, CryptoGlobe isn't able to verify these claims.

Interestingly, the user also revealed a developer cloned Ethereum-based “Shrimp Farm”, a “simple Ponzi scheme game”, on the Tron network. The game “got a ton of volume” which “led to a huge amount of clones onto Tron, including Tron Anthills, Crocs, and many others”, the redditor wrote.

Although Tron Shrimp “clearly had the most volume, users, and [number of transactions]”, it did “not win a prize” the user claims. However, Anthills’ developer, known as "diego", told his his community members that he “was one of the winners.”

Contest Judge Unaware "Prizes Have Been Announced"

Tron’s development team has not yet “posted a public list of the winners” prizes appear to have been awarded to outright “ponzi scheme” type apps, and one of the competition’s “judges himself does not have the final results yet [there’s an] email” circulating which states prizes have been announced. The email reportedly reads:

Dear TRON Developers, This email is to notify you that, up to this point, TRON Accelerator final prizes have been announced through emails already, we would like to thank you for your hard work and enthusiasm in developing your dApps for the past 5 weeks!

IBM’s VP of Blockchain and Crypto on World Wire, XLM, Ripple, XRP, and BTC Price

On Wednesday (February 20th), during an interview with Australia's largest comparison site Finder.com.au, Jesse Lund, IBM's Vice President of Blockchain and Digital Currencies, talked about his company's cross-border payments solution "IBM Blockchain World Wire"(which runs on the Stellar network), how this product differs from what Ripple is doing with xRapid, and gave his medium term (end of 2019) and long term (some day) price predictions for Bitcoin (BTC).

In this article, we focus on some of Lund's most interesting comments made during this interview.

IBM Blockchain World Wire

"The architecture of World Wire is really a cross-border payment network, the magic of which is the ability to send a payment message instruction saying 'Hey, I'm sending you something; get ready!' and on the other end, the receiver is making sure that who you are sending it yo is not some nefarious actor or bad actor, but once that happens, and that happens really fast, then we send the value along, and that transfer of value is made possible by an ecosystem of digital settlement instruments, of which [Stellar] lumens is one."

"IBM's long game in this is to be the network operator... So, the subscribers, the customers, if you will, of World Wire are market makers who really provide the pay in, pay out locations, and they themselves have corporate clients and probably retail clients. So, we're really providing a kind of conduit through which money can flow in real-time."

IBM Blockchain World Wire vs. Ripple's xRapid

"Credit Ripple for the vision of using a digital asset in order to enact immediate settlement with finality. I think their implementation followed one path. Our implementation is a little bit different. We are not the issuer of an asset. In fact, what we believe is that there should be an ecosystem of a variety of digital assets that provide the settlement instruments that enable these cross-border payments. The participants on the network should be able to choose and negotiate their choices in real-time and the pricing might be different depending on the settlement instrument you use. So, I think with Ripple, they're looking at XRP as the primary digital asset for settlement, and for us, it could be lumens, it could be Ripple, it could be XRP even, it could be Bitcoin, but it would also probably include other instruments like stablecoins and even eventually, hopefully soon, central bank issued digital currencies."

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Prediction

"[Bitcoin's price at the end of 2019] ... I think it's going be higher [than today], I'll go with $5,000, but let me just say this. I've got a long term outlook... I see Bitcoin at a million dollars some day. And I like that number because if Bitcoin is at a million dollars, then satoshi is on value parity with the U.S. penny, right? And that means there's $23 trillion of liquidity in this network. Think about $23 trillion in liquidity and how that changes things like corporate payments, large payments, and what that does to the financial services landscape."